Wild Honey (2 page)

By the time the driver opened her door, she’d cooled her imagination. “Take the stage door,” he said, helping her out. “You’ll find some stairs and a hallway to the auditorium. Wait on the stage. You’ll be told what to do.”

Sasha looked up and down the alley where they were parked and guessed the area to be somewhere in West L.A. From what she could discern from the building, which looked deserted, it was probably an old repertory theater. “Do you know what this is all about?” she asked the driver, virtually certain he wouldn’t tell her even if he did.

He shrugged and jerked his head toward the stage door.

“Right,” she said.

The stage door creaked mournfully as she opened it. The hallway was as dark and musty as a root cellar, and each creaky stair step sagged with her weight. Sasha’s fears resurfaced. Tight lid or not, a major movie studio wouldn’t resort to auditions in a place like this, she realized. She hesitated at the top of the stairs, her eyes following a dark, serpentine corridor. Halfway down on the left, a faint glow of light beckoned her toward the stage.

Sasha felt her pulse quicken. She gave herself a quick once-over, tugged at her leotard, smoothing its lines. Mixed with the fear was another emotion she hadn’t even been aware of. Hope. She wanted this to be a legitimate audition.
She wanted this part no matter what it turned out to be—
and not just for the money. In her heart of hearts she had always wanted to be an actress.

Sasha ran her fingers along the fragile gold chain around her neck, touched the antique charm, and drew strength from it. It was the one remembrance she had of her long-absent mother, the Russian Gypsy who’d deserted her husband and her six-year-old daughter a quarter century before. Alexandria. The woman she was named for.

The stage was dark except for a single stool flooded by a spotlight. Squinting at the brightness, she couldn’t move for a minute, might not have moved at all if the pull of the floodlit stool hadn’t been so great. Walking toward it through the darkness, she felt like an orbiting body being tugged toward the sun’s critical mass.

Despite the nerve-sparked trembling inside her, she arranged herself on the high seat gracefully, looked up, and smiled. Blinded by the spotlight for a second, she could see nothing beyond the white wall of light that enveloped her.

A shuffle of movement alerted her, the clink of something metal. Someone was in the auditorium.

A spark caught her eye. The striking of a match, she realized, watching the disembodied flame ignite tiny red embers before it disappeared. Now she knew something more than she had before. Her inquisitor smoked.

“Tell me about yourself, Ms. McCleod.”

Sasha started as though someone had touched her. Transfixed by the flickering ember of the cigarette, her brain registered several more bits of information. Her inquisitor was male. His voice was low and resonant, faintly laced with European inflections. And his voice was cold, crushed-ice cold.

“I’ve done a variety of things, a commercial—”

“I know what you’ve done,” he said, cutting her off. “I want to know about
you,
not your professional credits. Tell me about yourself.”

Staring into the black hole of an auditorium, Sasha wrestled with the enormity of his question. Tell him about herself? Did he want a life history? A brief personal profile? If he’d meant to throw her a curve, he had. “I’m a thirty-year-old actress who wants to know what the hell’s going on,” she said finally, quietly.

The cigarette froze, a still beacon in the darkness.

Her agent’s advice rushed to mind.
Ask no questions, say nothing, see nothing.
When would she learn to play the game? Her tendency toward confrontational honesty had been getting her into trouble since the day she’d first learned to string a sentence together.

“Sorry, but I’m not free to tell you what the hell’s going on,” he said, a husky hint of spring thaw in his voice. “With that in mind, do you want to continue the audition?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Then tell me what I need to know about Sasha McCleod.”

His voice did things to her name that had never been done before. The lingering emphasis on the last syllable of Sasha, and the sensual roll of the vowels in McCleod felt almost tactile. Without warning, the fine blond hairs on Sasha’s arms prickled, and her breathing quivered slightly. She wasn’t at all sure she wanted someone getting so familiar with her name.

“I’m an air force brat,” she said, the odd rush in her voice somehow glamorizing her hopelessly unglamorous history. “I was born in Albuquerque, on the base, of course. By the time I was ready to enter school, I guess I’d lived on half the air force bases in the country.” She chronicled the rest of her past briefly, told him about the fitness center and her acting experience, which she had the presence of mind to embellish with a couple of funny stories. Her energy rose as she talked, and with it, her desire to make an impression on him. Yes, she did want the part, she decided.

Wondering about the silent figure she was pouring out her heart to, Sasha found herself predicting his reactions by the movements of his cigarette. When it was motionless, she figured she had his attention.

“I studied with the Brownings,” she finished up, smiling. “Rowen and Anna. They’re very eclectic in their approach—Stanislavsky, Method, some of the other experiential techniques. I particularly liked their Gestalt workshops.”

The red embers glowed hotter, then dipped impatiently. “What
don’t
you like, Sasha?”

“What don’t I li—” The question stopped her for only a moment. Sasha was passionate in her dislikes, something of a crusader, in fact. “Well, I can’t abide conceit of any kind, I get homicidal when people cut in front of me in traffic, and I’ve been known to pluck cigarettes out of people’s mouths and snap them in half.”

The embers hung in the air.

“For...health reasons, of course.” Struck with the awareness of what she’d said, she added, “One man even thanked me. He said I saved his life.” Her conviction grew fainter with each word. “I still hear from him occasionally...every November twentieth on Great American Smokeout Day.”

The embers vanished altogether, crushed into oblivion on the auditorium floor, no doubt. Sasha shifted uncomfortably and began to memorize the cracks in the stage floor.

From his seat in the depths of the auditorium, Marc-André Renaud smiled faintly as he groundout a Gauloise under the heel of his boot. His interest piqued, he leaned forward, studying the woman on the stage as she flicked her head, a nervous gesture meant to toss the stray blond tendrils from her face. Despite the nerves, there was a natural grace in the way she held herself, in her sloped shoulders, in the arch of her throat. She was lovely, he admitted reluctantly, she was glowing and golden, with the toned body and vital, healthy presence of a superior athlete.

His pulse jumped as she looked up, straight at him, peering into the darkness as though she could see him. He knew she couldn’t, but he had the most uncanny sensation of having been caught at something. His heart was beating harder, and the possibility that she could have such an effect on him, that
anyone
could have such an effect on him, was curious in itself.

He settled back in the chair, cutting off the response quickly, efficiently, with a simple flex of his steel willpower. The momentary lapse had been almost pleasant, but he needed his wits about him today. There could be no slipups, no mistakes. The only thing that mattered, he reminded himself, was Sasha McCleod’s resemblance to Leslie Parrish. And the fact that the studio’s production chief would be arriving at any minute to hear his decision.

Up on the stage the woman in question took a long breath and tucked her leg beneath her, obviously nervous. A production assistant was hovering in the background with the script. “Give her the pages, Jimmy,” Marc directed.

“Right,” Jimmy called back.

Startled, Sasha jerked around and saw a young man approaching her from the wings. She felt the unsteadiness in her own hands as he handed her a worn, marked-up script which she might have dropped if he hadn’t tucked it so firmly into her grip. “Thank you,” she whispered.

“Relax,” he said under his breath, a friendly swagger in his voice. “You’re a sure thing. You could be her twin sis—”

“
Jimmy!
One more slip like that,” the disembodied voice warned harshly, “and you’re off this picture. Now, clear out.”

“Was that necessary?” she demanded.

“Turn to page thirty-two and read, Ms. McCleod. Or you’ll be the next to leave.”

Sasha snapped through the pages, found the one he wanted, and began reading. Her voice tight, her spine stiff, she massacred lines that called for a halting, tearful reconciliation with a loved one. “I’m no good without you, Charlie,” she said. “I’ve been crazy with loneliness, Charlie, wild with needing you...”

Aware that she was killing whatever chance she had left, Sasha also became aware of something else. Above the sound of her own voice she heard the rustle of feet and the low tones of conversation. There was more than one person in the auditorium.

“Thank you. That’ll do,” a second male voice called out just as Sasha was reminding herself that large amounts of money and a fabulous deal were at stake. Again, Lou Ryan’s words came to her seconds too late.
Burn up that script with your interpretation.

“Excuse me? Sir?” she asked, squinting into the darkness. “I was just getting into the scene, just beginning to feel its rhythms—” She held up the book. “If I could try it again?” Hearing mumbled conversation resume, she flipped back to the first page. “Charlie, oh,
Charlie,
” she read, her voice soaked with emotion. “I’m no good without you. I—”

“Nice,” he called out. “Really, very nice, Ms.

McCleod, but we’ve heard enough. There’s a dressing room backstage. If you’ll wait there, someone will be with you in a minute.”

The dressing room was a peeling mess of warped and water-stained plasterboard. Seated on a wobbly folding chair, Sasha contemplated her dismal surroundings. She held out no hope for the role, and as the minutes ticked off, she began to wonder if she’d been forgotten by the limo driver too. The man in the theater had said he’d send someone by for her. Where was he?

A half hour later she was pacing nervously. Perhaps she’d just leave the way she came in, find a phone booth, and call a taxi.

Staring at a gruesome crack in the ceiling, her fingers splayed against her face, Sasha heard the door open behind her. “Oh, thank God,” she said, whirling around, totally unprepared for the sight of the man who entered the room.

Swaying slightly with the unspent momentum of her turn, she stared at him like a starstruck autograph-seeker, sure that tall and devastatingly handsome as he was, he must be some kind of movie star.

Ironically Sasha didn’t care much for actors, especially tall and devastatingly handsome actors. But this one had eyes like ice crystals backlit by a sheer blue sky. His dark eyebrows accented the coldest, palest gaze she’d ever seen. His hair was dark, too, a devil’s aura, and the sensual twist to his full mouth stirred Sasha’s imagination...and her heartbeat.

It was a mouth a woman couldn’t look at without wondering what it would feel like on hers. It was a face of startling shadings and cruel contrasts. And Sasha McCleod, a woman not easily awed, was riveted.

“The Brownings couldn’t have been much good,” he said, “or they would have prepared you for cold readings.”

So this was her inquisitor, she realized.

“The Brownings are geniuses, both of them,” she said. “The reading was my fault. I was...upset.”

He shifted his weight, cocked his head slightly, studying her. “And this is your style, to be upset?”

If the year were 1945, he could be a World War II resistance fighter, she thought, reacting to the image that flashed through her mind. A
French
resistance fighter. He had on worn jeans, a black turtleneck that electrified the ice blue of his eyes, and a battered leather bomber jacket. A vague recollection burned through Sasha’s vision. No, he wasn’t a movie star or a reincarnated resistance fighter, but she had seen him before...somewhere.

“Turn your head to the right,” he said, his thumb pressed against his lower lip thoughtfully.

She did it automatically, but a cord within her tightened. Sasha harbored a fierce dislike of anything resembling an order. After a lifetime of the colonel’s benign authoritarianism, she’d nurtured a grudging respect for, and a smoldering resentment of authority.

“A determined chin,” he observed, his voice detached but not exactly indifferent. “Now the left.”

She resisted instinctively, met his wintry stare, and turned her head to the left. “What’s this all about,” she asked. “Why am I here?”

“Look at me now, yes, smile at me,” he said, ignoring her questions. “A
smile,
” he directed quietly, “not a death grimace. You have a good mouth, nicely shaped. Yes,
yes,
that’s it, a smile. Now take a full turn and walk away from me.”

Turning, Sasha realized she didn’t like the man’s methods. Good mouth indeed. He was manipulating her, conning her like some gullible, simpering actress. Beyond that he was several notches too cool. Self-assured was the word that came to mind—ruthlessly self-assured.

“Turn back. Stop, stop there.” His eyes flashed like sunlight bouncing off glass. “Now...untie that thing.”

“What?” Sasha’s fingers froze on the zippered bodice of her leotard. “Why?”

“It’s a sexy picture.” He shrugged, folded his arms. “I need a sexy actress.”

A nerve sparked in Sasha’s hand. She felt her heart pounding, felt heat crawling up her neck. He’d caught her off guard, and it wasn’t just his request that alarmed her. She’d suddenly remembered who he was. Marc-André Renaud, the expatriate French film director the entertainment columnists were fond of bashing. They’d labeled him autocratic and difficult. If she remembered correctly, he’d hit a studio vice-president two years before and had been blacklisted.

He was infamous for other things as well, she recalled, such as his scorchingly sensual
film noir
style.